More than four billion years ago, before continents drifted and oceans teemed with life, Earth was little more than molten rock and chemical chaos. Yet, within that cosmic turbulence, matter became aware of itself.
For decades, science has tried to explain how the first cell could have formed spontaneously from the raw materials of a young planet.
Now, a new theoretical study argues that the odds of the first cell forming spontaneously were so small that we may need to consider far stranger possibilities—like life being seeded, guided, or even “terraformed” into existence.
In a paper titled “The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI,” Dr. Robert G. Endres, a biophysicist at Imperial College London, presents a sweeping and highly quantitative look at the origins of life. He blends information theory, thermodynamics, and a touch of philosophical daring.
Dr. Endres doesn’t claim that life was designed, but he argues that the math behind life’s spontaneous emergence may stretch credibility.
“‘All cells come from cells’ leads us into a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: where did the first cell come from?” Dr. Endres writes. “Either it came from somewhere else—conveniently outsourcing the mystery—or it emerged from the laws of physics and chemistry on a young, chaotic, and geologically active Earth.”
To address this, Dr. Endres asked how much structured information would have to self-organize from randomness to form the simplest living system.
Using Kolmogorov complexity—which measures the shortest possible algorithmic description of a system—and rate–distortion theory, which studies how information can be compressed without losing essential detail, he calculated the “information bottleneck” between disordered prebiotic chemistry and the first protocell.
In his model, the “entropy collapse” of chaotic chemistry into the organized structure of life—meaning the transition from disorder to order—depends on a delicate balance between information gained and the breakdown of molecules.
That might sound modest. But viewed through the lens of billions of years and countless chemical combinations, it implies an astonishing improbability. For life to emerge naturally, the prebiotic world would have needed just the right combination of persistence, energy, and luck—essentially a cosmic lottery win.
“In other words, without immense persistence, life’s emergence becomes cosmologically implausible, potentially pointing to alternative mechanisms,” Dr. Endres notes.
That “alternative mechanism” is where the study brushes against ideas once relegated to the fringes of science fiction. In his paper, Dr. Endres doesn’t endorse any single hypothesis, but he acknowledges that directed panspermia—the concept that life was intentionally seeded by an advanced civilization—remains “a speculative but logically open alternative.”